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Movies in the Parks

The 100 best movies of all time

Movies—everyone has their favorites. You already trust Time Out to bring you all the best new movie releases every week and to guide you through the best movies to see each month. We're also the best place to discover upcoming movies you can't miss.
Now, we present the big one: the 100 best movies of all time.
To help us choose our list, we asked a select bunch of actors —including Bill Hader, Juliette Binoche, Andy Serkis and Michael Sheen—to share their personal ten favorite movies. From there, we calculated the 100 greatest movies of all time.
Below, you can explore our definitive list and you can discover which movies each and every voter picked.
How many have you seen? And how many do you agree on? Share your comments and your own favorite movies below.
Edited by Joshua Rothkopf, produced by Vivienne van Vliet. Written by Dave Calhoun, Cath Clarke, David Ehrlich, Tom Huddleston and Joshua Rothkopf.

The Chicago Onscreen Local Film Showcase

Fall in love with local films and filmmakers as part of the Chicago Onscreen Local Film Showcase. From July 12–August 9, support these homegrown artists as they show off their works as part of the Chicago Park District’s popular Movies in the Parks program, coming to seven locations across five weekends. On August 9 at Lake Shore Park, the Reel2Real teen film festival centers on works by and for teenagers.

Films for families: The top 50 movies to watch as a family

New movies we love

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Trainwreck

Amy Schumer is a comedy superwoman: Her stand-up is funny as hell, she’s a viral sensation, and lately she’s become every feminist’s girl crush. Now she’s the best thing to happen to Hollywood since the Tina Fey/Amy Poehler double act. Schumer’s new autobiographical comedy, Trainwreck, about a commitment-phobic NYC writer, is the funniest film of the summer—outrageous and out to make you think. The posters say “from the guy who brought you Bridesmaids” (meaning superproducer Judd Apatow), but Trainwreck is more of a straightforward rom-com, with one big difference: Schumer plays the traditional “man” role. She’s hard-partying, promiscuous Amy, a writer for a Maxim-esque rag that publishes articles like “How to talk your girlfriend into a three-way.” But when assigned to interview a sports surgeon (Bill Hader, adorable), Amy cracks and gets serious. Trainwreck isn’t perfect. An emotionally weak ending feels like a cop-out. But you can forgive this film a lot. You forget how limited so many movies’ ideas of women are until Schumer launches into an extended tampon joke. It’s a film about everyday sexism and double standards. Schumer is calling this stuff out, but you only realize this when you stop laughing. Wince-inducing in many ways, Trainwreck has its priorities right.

Tangerine

A reinvigorating reminder of what indie filmmaking can—and should—do, this bracingly brilliant new movie from Starlet writer-director Sean Baker (who co-wrote the script with Chris Bergoch) tells an L.A. story so florid and electric that it feels like a Pedro Almodóvar remake of Crank. Set over the course of a sunbaked Christmas Eve in Southern California, the premise explodes out of the gate: Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) is a rambunctious trans prostitute who’s just been unleashed from a 28-day stint in prison. Enjoying a celebratory snack at Donut Time with her best friend and colleague Alexandra (Mya Taylor), Sin-Dee learns that her pimp boyfriend, Chester (James Ransone), has been sleeping around. Adding insult to injury, the girl he’s been sleeping with has a vagina. And so begins a roaring rampage of revenge. (Sin‑Dee’s furious first steps out of the restaurant are appropriately punctuated with blasts of gunfire on the soundtrack.) If Sin-Dee is the boiling blood of Baker’s movie, Alexandra is its beating heart. Most of the story is seen through her eyes as she follows the wake of her colead’s carnage. A proud fixture of Los Angeles’ seediest streets, Alexandra has just started taking the hormones required for her body to catch up with her sense of self, and the vagrant path she cuts across the city palpably conveys the vulnerability of being trans in a world where people cling to their genders for shelter.

The Look of Silence

Joshua Oppenheimer's 2012 documentary The Act of Killing was a radical, disquieting thing: a bizarre forum for Indonesia's genocidal leaders (still feared nearly 50 years after their anti-Communist purge) to recreate their murders as fantasy skits. Dressing up as gangsters, these happy butchers seemed to really enjoy themselves, and if Oppenheimer never quite challenged them on their self-described heroism, his film ended up being a quiet indictment, trembling in the presence of evil men.The Look of Silence is Oppenheimer's staggering follow-up. It was made roughly in tandem with The Act of Killing (and sourced from the same research) and is the film for those who feel the director didn't go far enough. A superior work of confrontational boldness, it might be the movie Oppenheimer wanted to make in the first place. Again, we sit with the perpetrators, who speak of drinking their victims' blood or knifing hundreds of people down by a river. Shamelessly, a pair of ex-militia men make their way through the reeds and smile for photos at the site.But this time, the provocative presence of Adi, an optician whose older brother was among those killed, makes everyone squirm.

Dope

You’ve seen L.A.’s menacing Inglewood before—a hood of bouncing low-riders and uneasy staredowns—but not, we’re guessing, in an indie comedy that totally reinvents the teens-on-a-wacky-misadventure movie. Dope presents a trio of lovable dorks: Malcolm (Shameik Moore), Jib (The Grand Budapest Hotel’s Tony Revolori) and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons). What do they like doing? Getting good grades, listening to classic ’90s hip-hop, BMX biking and playing in their punk band, Oreo (zing). You know, Malcolm says: “white stuff.”
Writer-director Rick Famuyiwa never quite sends his nerdlings to the slaughterhouse, even as they accidentally get involved in a drug deal and the Molly underworld. Instead, he doubles down on an applying-to-Harvard satire that both upends demographic expectations while insisting (at times a bit strenuously) that we all aim a little higher. Dope has thrilling moments and flies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but its caustic intelligence glints fast and furious.
Follow Joshua Rothkopf on Twitter: @joshrothkopf

Inside Out

It’s all in the mind in Pixar’s latest, a delightful, frenetic, near-experimental animated film from the makers of Up and Toy Story. Pixar fans will be in seventh heaven with the film’s bold thinking—and kids will be straining to listen to imaginary voices in their heads—after diving into the mind of Riley, an 11-year-old girl whose tiny world is turned upside down when she moves from Minnesota to San Francisco with her mom and dad. It’s a simple story, featuring a new school and nervous parents. But the real drama goes on in Riley’s head, where we meet Joy (Amy Poehler), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith), each of them sharing a physicality to match their temperament. Disgust gives great sneer, while Anger is red, squat and prone to shooting fire out of his head. We watch each of them fight for control over Riley’s life, and when Joy and Sadness go AWOL from their psychological HQ, we take a tour of some crazy mental byways, including the Abstract Thinking Department, where Joy and Sadness briefly become 2-D characters and then, momentarily, one-color squiggles. There’s too much to sponge up in one viewing. Blink and you’ll miss a character saying, “These facts and opinions look so similar,” when passing boxes marked FACTS and OPINIONS. We leave the subconscious (“where they take all the troublemakers”) too quickly, and then it’s on to the Dream Department, where we see the day’s memories being adapted into drama. At

Love & Mercy

Beach Boy genius Brian Wilson loved being nestled in the recording studio, especially, as Love & Mercy suggests, when the other guys were off chasing Barbara Anns in every port. To watch the delicate Paul Dano (a magically right choice with a beautiful voice) steer his ace session band through what would become Pet Sounds is to have a piece of essential rock history recreated right before your eyes. Bobby pins rattle charmingly on piano wires, bicycle bells chime, and “even the happy songs sound sad” (per pissed-off bandmate Mike Love). Wilson, a pop savant, was chasing some kind of dragon, and as the movie toggles years forward to the scared, overmedicated Wilson of the 1980s (John Cusack, absorbingly strange in the tougher part), you sense that the dragon bit back.
Half the film moves toward mental breakdown, the other half toward emancipation. Best seen as an L.A. psychodrama that sometimes plays like Boogie Nights or Safe, sometimes like its own beast, Love & Mercy does an exquisite job with the interior spaces: cozy vocal booths, locked-off bedrooms, air-conditioned safety zones. (Not for nothing is a two-minute Wilson masterpiece called “In My Room.”) The script is by Oren Moverman, who performed a kind of jujitsu on Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There—his Wilson story is a lot more traditional, but more moving as well. There are some too-obvious metaphors (i.e., Brian struggling in the deep end of a swimming pool), but you forgive them.
As stunning as the two l

New movie releases

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The best new movies on Netflix in August 2015

They call ’em the dog days and, sure enough, Netflix has a terrific dog movie for you come August: the dreamlike revenge fantasy White God. Elsewhere on their just-announced lineup, there’s the anxiety of a Hefner-like impresario (The Look of Love) and two of last year’s most impressive female turns, one from Kristen Wiig (Welcome to Me) and the other from Marion Cotillard (Two Days, One Night). Here are the five most exciting new Netflix movies to stream on your couch, plus a complete list of everything that’s being added to the service this month.

The best movies to see this month

Maggie

Henry Hobson’s zombie movie does for coping with terminal illness what Dawn of the Dead did for consumerism, the difference here being that Hobson isn’t interested in satire, only sadness. Oh, and he’s got Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The film begins in the aftermath of a plague that’s referred to as the Turn, a reference to the process by which this incurable virus slowly transforms its victims into feral, flesh-eating transmitters of the contagion. The worst of it is over, but for Wade (Arnold Schwarzenegger), the hell is just beginning. Your typical Kansas City farm boy with the body of an aging gladiator and the accent of a robot sent back in time to prevent the apocalypse, Wade is searching for his eponymous teenage daughter (Abigail Breslin). The moment he finds her, infected and afraid, epitomizes how cleverly the film suffuses the realness of human tragedy with the morbid spark of genre fiction: “She’s going to lose her appetite,” a doctor informs him, “and then she’s going to get it back.”
Choosing, perhaps irresponsibly, to take Maggie back to their remote Missouri home rather than dump her at the government’s ominous quarantine, Wade is forced to confront the increasingly gruesome reality of his daughter’s condition, Wade begins to confront the gruesome reality of her condition, an ordeal that only gets harder as her veins begin to turn black and one of her fingers rots off.
Hobson resists the temptation to spice things up with more traditional scares, and the film

Queen and Country

A direct sequel to 1987’s Hope and Glory—and the best thing that John Boorman has made since—Queen and Country begins where that film leaves off, continuing the director’s autobiographical account of his relationship with war and the collateral effect it has on the people at its periphery. When last we saw Billy Rowan, the impish schoolboy who served as Boorman’s alter ego in Hope and Glory, he was thanking Hitler for blowing his schoolhouse to smithereens. Queen and Country catches up with Bill (Turner) nine years later, the lad now a strapping young man with an appropriately adult name to match.
It’s 1952, and the Korean War is in full swing. Bill, a burgeoning cinephile without a lick of interest in being forced to shoot at strangers several thousand miles away, is whiling away his youth on the idyllic U.K. island home he shares with his parents, but it’s only a matter of time before his conscription notice arrives. It’s at boot camp that Bill meets Percy (Jones, a convincingly manic Brit), the two troublemakers becoming fast friends as they do their best to avoid one war while grappling with the fallout from another.
Marrying the military milieu of Full Metal Jacket with the wistful English cheekiness that colored The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Queen and Country is as achingly romantic a film as has ever been set during basic training. The brunt of Boorman’s bittersweet memories involve the lads chasing girls, teaching new recruits how to type, and irritating th

Ex Machina

Stephen Hawking has warned us that the growing power of artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Technology has not yet reached the point where a robot has passed the Turing Test—fooling people into believing they’re talking to a human. But screenwriter and novelist Alex Garland’s debut feature takes us to the very moment of technological birth. What might it look like when we get there?Pretty damn slinky, as it happens. Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is an ace computer programmer who wins a competition to visit the remote home of his Silicon Valley company’s charismatic billionaire founder (Oscar Isaac). Caleb’s task is to test his boss’s new invention: AVA, a robot whose glowing LEDs and whirring servos combine with a lithe feminine form and the angelic features of actress Alicia Vikander. Caleb isn’t just convinced, he’s smitten, but the more he learns about the relationship between AVA and her volatile, hard-drinking creator, the more concerned he becomes for her future.There are elements of romance and dystopian thriller here, though Garland’s art-house pacing keeps us waiting for these threads to emerge, lining up thoughtful dialogue exchanges between man and machine. Vikander’s spellbinding, not-quite-human presence (her synthetic skin is silky yet creepy) keeps us watching. But an obvious twist and some clunky plotting—how about those sudden power cuts?—drain much of the credibility from a story which promised so much. A bit more intelligence wouldn't

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Joss Whedon’s first Avengers movie was the epic finale to Marvel’s cinematic “Phase One,” herding all the franchise’s disparate elements in a rousing, rewarding whole. Age of Ultron, though, has a definite mid-season feel to it, telling a compelling but never game-changing story while laying the foundations for the epic, two-part Infinity War due in 2018. It may be piled with MacGuffins, magic crystals, red-skinned demigods and psychic asides, but at the heart of Ultron is a simple, even derivative plot about overweening ambition and technology run amok. When Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) combine to create the world’s first fully functioning AI, they don’t stop to think of the consequences. And of course it’s not long before Ultron (voiced by James Spader) is building an army of robots bent on wiping out the population of earth—starting with the noble Avengers. Whedon has revealed that his first cut ran for well over three hours, and it shows: Ultron feels excessively nipped and tucked, barreling from one explosive set-piece to the next, leaving ideas half-formed and character motivations murky. While the introduction of new superheroes like Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and the confusingly multi-talented Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) may excite comic fans, it makes for such a crowded field that even star players like Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Captain America (Chris Evans) are shoved to the sidelines. Age of Ultron is still a Joss